It's funny. When HBO first said, Look, we have True Detective that Issa Lopez wrote, I went, True Detective. I love True Detective. The first season touched a nerve with elements that resonated so deeply with audiences.

Repeating the feeling that that first season created has been really, really hard. I love the feeling of a darkness contained in all things and in ourselves and the fight to cross the threshold into that darkness, knowing that there's things deeper in it than what you can see. Alaska felt like a natural place to explore these themes.

Even though it's a fictional story, story is a reflection of the world we're living in.

. I'm Alice Khaniklen. I'm an Inupak writer, podcaster, and activist from Urkervik, Alaska, America's northernmost town, located 350 miles above the Arctic Circle. As an Alaska native, I'm excited to be your host for this companion series to the newest season of HBO's True Detective Night Country. Like a lot of the world, I have been captivated by the True Detective series. In fact, I've been a fan since the very beginning, but I never imagined that the show would find its way into my home state of Alaska. The series takes viewers deep into Alaska's frozen landscape to reveal some of the realities that Alaska Native people face. It's a tapestry woven with elements of reality and fiction. It's a lot to unpack, which is the point of this podcast. Each week, we'll dive deeper into the characters, story lines, and themes. We'll hear from the series Creators, Actors, and Those Who Brought the World of Ennis to Life. We'll also explore the very real themes and issues that impact Native Alaskans today that the show beautifully weaves into the story. Because there's one thing I know. Alaska has many hidden stories that need to be heard.

This woman's never going to be solved.

What do you mean?

Ennis killed Annie. No killer was ever going to be found.

If you haven't watched part one of the series, I recommend doing so before listening to this podcast. The series opens up within the world of Ennis, Alaska, just as the Long Night covers the landscape in darkness. Now, Ennis isn't a real town, but it was inspired by real Alaskan towns. It's here in Ennis that we're thrown into the mysterious disappearance of the scientists at the Salal Lab, a research center investigating the Arctic's geology, biology, and the potential impact of climate change. As for our true detectives, the Salal case is being led by Detective Liz Danvers, played by Jody Foster, and through the discovery of an Indigenous woman's tongue found at the scene, is reconnected with Detective Evangeline Navarro, who has a suspicion that the tongue is connected to a cold case murder of Annie Masu Kautak. There's clearly bad blood between the two, though we don't quite know why yet.

You don't really think they're going to find them, do you?

I hear they want to believe some miracles. Picking up any spirit vibes?

No.

All I'm picking up is your shitty fucking attitude.

Part one comes to a thrilling and mysterious close when the missing Sawwell scientists are found violently frozen in the snow and ice, and our detectives are called in. We don't yet know the significance to all of these story lines, but we do know that it's compounded by the darkness of Alaska's remote lens. Landscape. We're left wondering, what are the origins of these crimes? Why is Ennis, Alaska, the focus of the series? And what impact does Alaska Native culture play in the narratives?

I was an archeologist, and very early in my archeology career, I realized that I was really not a scientist and more of a storyteller.

This is Issa Lopez, showrunner of this season of True Detective. I sat down with Issa to have her explain the genesis of Ennis: A Night Country.

I started in soap opera as a writer, and it was a huge education on discipline for writing, on imagination to get as much as you can from a medium with tremendous restrictions. When I had a chance to direct, it started with very dark comedies, with a social commentary in them. I a lot of projects with incredible filmmakers in the US. But in the middle of doing all of that, we were in the middle of the pandemic. My life didn't change as much as most people because my life at that time was writing all day. I started to wonder if I could write a murder mystery on my own. I was very curious about the Arctic. Having shot a couple of winter scenes in a series in the UK, and having written a Western. I started playing with the idea a little bit in the same vein as the Western of characters that have to find themselves in outlandish landscapes. As I was cultivating that and starting to outline characters and situations, I got a call from HBO, and they wanted to revive True Detective, and they asked what I would do with it. And here I am.

Early in the development of the project, Issah was joined by executive producer Mary Jo Winkler, who is also tasked with helping her bring the story to life.

I have a background in producing feature films and some television, and have always looked for projects that have meaning to me. When I complete a project, I typically sit down with a blank piece of paper and a pencil and write down what I'm looking for in my next project. I wrote down that I would like to work with a female female director on a female forward project that is entertaining and addresses social issues. So I gladly joined the team. From the first read of the pilot script, I was actually blown away. It really felt like it aligned with my wishlist of themes I was interested in. The place really sets the stage, but then it's just the richness of the characters and who they are. It's written from a female perspective, and it takes place entirely at night in the cold and the dark and the ice, which brings its own mystique and mystery and intrigue.

A show like True Detective takes years to create. There are a lot of moving pieces, but it all has to start somewhere. In speaking with Issah, I ask where this season's core ideas originated.

Clearly, Maybe the first season of True Detective touched on a nerve. Repeating the feeling that that first season created has been really, really hard. When I knew that I was going to have all these male scientists disappearing and vanishing in to thin air in the environment of these towns, I felt that there was a direct invitation to tell a female story that was related to that. You have the two detectives and how they interact with the place and how the place slowly yields its secrets to them. I felt that if I could capture that, if I could capture that relationship between these two characters, I could do anything. It is a meditation on loneliness and how we carry it, even when we're with people and the ghosts that walk with us. But it is also a chance to explore two very different views of the universe. We have one character that believes that the world is what you see and there is a reason for everything. We have another character that understands and accepts that there is a wider world than what we can perceive. The clash between those two visions was very interesting to me.

If you've watched part one of the series on HBO, then you know how this week's story ends. Our detectives are working on more than one case, the first of which is the unsolved murder of Annie Masu Kautak.

People called her Annie K. Stabbed 32 times. A sharp, unidentified object. Starshape wounds.Murder weapon never found.Missing tongue?

Yeah, never recovered.

The Other Case launches the series, The mysterious Disappearance of the Men from the Salal Station, who are later strangely found frozen in the snow and ice.

Honestly, this is how I came up with the idea. I looked at why am I, and I think all of us, so fascinated, so enthralled with true crime. I think that there is something about a question without an answer, an incomplete puzzle that drives our brains insane, that we need to know all the story. But not knowing all the story is what keeps us going. So I went back to the mysteries that have absolutely fascinated me when I was a kid. So there was the Marie Celeste, which was a ship that in the 19th century left New York and was found some weeks later just drifting, and the entire crew had disappeared, and their plates were on the tables, and And they were never seen again. And to this day, nobody knows what happened to the crew of the Marie Celeste. So Salal Station is born. And there was a very famous case called the Dyatlov Pass mystery, where some very experienced Russian mountaineers went to cross a path in the mountains and they died. But the circumstances of their deaths were very strange. There were self-inflicted wounds, there was radiation on some the bodies, but the current theories don't explain every single one of the details, in my opinion.

Also, I don't want it to be explained. I love the fact that it's incomplete and it still drives us crazy. So I put all of that together in a little brewing pot and let it become a slowly night country.

The landscape of the series is cold and frigid. It leaves us wondering why it was chosen as the setting and how it came to life on screen. Studying Alaska is one thing. It's a totally different thing to experience it firsthand. While some of the Southern cities like Anchorage are more physically hospitable, the northernmost regions are remote, expensive, and can be difficult to access during different parts of the year. That's Ennis. While Ennis is a fictional town, it feels similar to Alaska Skins like myself. It's also a completely new setting from the first three seasons of True Detective, which took place in Louisiana, California, and Arkansas.

Let's look at season one of True Detective, Hot, Sweaty, Male. We wanted to do complete opposite, right? Dark, ice, cold. We talked about the script, and then we talked about what would our next steps be. I said, Well, look, the first thing we have to do is go to Alaska. We need to understand the environment, the community.

What I wanted to do is pack a bag, move to Alaska. I couldn't because we were in the dead of the pandemic. Then the moment that travel was It's possible I jumped on a plane and I went there. It was incredible. It was a shock. Just breathing the air and just your eyelashes freezing is a completely new experience.

We flew into Anchorage. We visited Nome and Katsubu. Katsubu is like super high Arctic. It just keeps getting more and more remote. Only one flight a day, maybe every two days, if there's a snowstorm, there's a look of terror. We got out of the scout bus and jumped into a rickety wooden sled that was on the back of a snowmobile and drove across the ice to an abandoned ship that was stuck in the ice. It was minus 22 degrees. I mean, it's cold, it's icy, it's snowy, it's very isolated and hard to get to. It's stunning visually. There's a real sense of community and identity in each of these places. I think that that trip really informed Issa's writing and gave her another layer to investigate.

It was incredible to make the connections between that I had created in fiction and this incredible feeling of meeting characters and sitting down with these people and hearing about their lives. And I was meeting people I had written about many, many things that I had no idea and I learned during those trips and that informed deeply and changed profoundly the scripts that were already written. The sky and the frozen ocean extend forever. I'm not a religious person, but you could feel the presence of the divine when you stood in those places. When you're standing there and staring into the ocean and feeling the silence I could completely understand why. One thing I observe immediately is how people are incredibly religious in Alaska. There are so many churches, and everybody you meet is involved with their church. Faith is big.

As she learned more, she went deeper in wanting to represent the Inupiat culture. We looked at not just the visuals of the community, but we went to schools and community centers and cemeteries and houses and police stations and fish factories to really soak up those communities. They spend a couple of months every year in complete darkness, and it's extreme.

The Long Night, Siquin Ghilak, which translates to One Without the sun. The sun sets late November and doesn't return back to the Arctic until late January. It's the two-month period where everyone above the Arctic circle experiences total darkness 24 hours a day, except for a faint twilight around noon. This phenomenon is captured in part one's opening scene.

The opening sequence alone of the caribou jumping off the cliff was so symbolic to me.

I think it was setting the stage with a bit of a message. The sun goes down and there's something mysterious that's driving the caribou off the cliff. I think I think it's up to the audience. You can take that for whatever you want to imagine it is.

I asked Issa Lopez where the inspiration for the opening scene came from.

When I was rewatching True Detective, there is a phrase that is stuck with me, and it was a line that Rose Cole says, All the stories are in the end light versus darkness. And darkness is way bigger. I was curious about that, about secrets. Using the environment as a reflection of what's happening with the characters and with the town and with the story and with the plot, there is more to what you can see. Very close to you. You can see very little around you. Then beyond that is darkness. That creates a space where there is more happening, and discovering requires for you to venture into It is a metaphor. I completely understand that for Alaskans, darkness is just nature. You get into the dark season and it's not mysterious and terrible and dark, even though it's dark. It's a time for introspection. I think that's beautiful. What works for the series is exploring the unknown side of it.

Inuit or people of the circumpolar north, know this season of darkness to be a time of reflection, a time of rest, and a time share stories. The darkness doesn't have to be scary. Life goes on, but living in the Arctic certainly isn't for everyone. The climate and lack of light also presented significant issues for creating a series like Night Country.

Alaska, sadly, is a difficult place to shoot. There's not a lot of infrastructure. There isn't a crew base to handle a large scale production of six episodes of premium series television. We were tasked with like, Well, where are we going to do this? The places that reflected what we had seen in Alaska were not easily accessible. Dan Taylor, our production designer, was able to really find the essence of Alaska in Iceland.

We had to recreate these towns that still have the flavor of gold towns that are whaling towns, that are in contact with caribou and with creatures that you don't find in Iceland, which is very isolated. It was a huge endeavor, but I enlisted the help of Daniel Taylor. I had worked with him before, and he came to Alaska with me, and he absolutely understood the mission. He brought a lot of things directly from there.

Dan is genius, and he took an amazing photographs, and we talked along the way as we were all walking through these towns and on the frozen ocean. This is what the house should feel like. This is what the community, the school, and the Police stations should feel like. He's like a journalist, and he took so many photos, and then we brought them back to Iceland, and it was our task to recreate that. What was brilliant about Iceland is that What we found was shootable landscapes within 30 minutes of the city center of Reykjavik. Iceland also has crew and infrastructure and is a growing film community. We had the benefit of crews who were used to shooting in the elements. The crew there is super hardy. They're problem solvers, and there's nothing they can't do. The Icelanders were just great at it. They shoot in these extreme extraordinary locations all the time. So it really paid off to shoot there.

When I spoke with Dan Taylor, he really emphasized how the dark and cold of Alaska began to take shape as a character within the series.

I wanted to try and convey with the set design, this terror and fear is just outside the window, and it comes in the shape of the darkness and the ice and the cold. I think very often when you see film sets, you don't think about what's outside the window, really. You don't give huge amounts of money to it or you draw the curtain. I felt like all the way through the story, you want to understand that that sinister edge is literally just on the other side of the glass. I feel like that's really important to try and remind the audience that you have a window with the snow outside smashing against the window, and it's literally banging on the glass saying, I'm waiting for you. You get the feeling that you step outside for a minute and you're crisp, you're frozen solid. I wanted to remind the audience of with the design.

While the frigid conditions are all too real, Alaska has a long history of sensationalism and misrepresentation. Sadly, the world rarely gets a chance to accurately see the issues Alaska Native people encounter. It was important to Eisa and Mary Jo to bring awareness to these issues and those fighting them.

There's a natural connection to nature and Mother Earth. There's also show the need to look at the travesties of what's happening in the world and try to address them, even though it's a fictional story. Story is a reflection of the world we're living in, of real events that occur in Alaska Native communities that we are representing in the show. I think it's important to tell these stories and to shine a light on these injustices. If you're not aware of any of these issues before in episode one, you will certainly be by episode six.

There are a number of injustices that Alaska natives face, but they do not define us. Our ways of life may make us different from other Alaska Americans, but it's imperative that we uphold and celebrate the traditions handed down from generation to generation. This is something that the Night Country team also took to heart as the series was being developed.

We worked together with Alaskan producers and advisors who put us in contact with Inupiac elders, the Council of Alderwomen, who went through the scripts with us and started a very very deep conversation of what from little tiny things of, this is not how we say it, or sense of humor is this, to more profound meditations on what are we saying really and being mindful of the messages that we're putting out there. So that was incredible.

We had two amazing Indigenous producers who were with us, really making sure that we were as authentic as we possibly could be. I think they were very clear with Issa if something bumped them. There were little shifts that Issa made.

There was also a effort to incorporate Alaska natives into the cast, led by Francine Maisler and her associate, Amber Wakefield, Alaskan casting team, Deb Schilt, Stacey Cain, and Mary Lou Asikseq, and Icelandic Alda Gujansteter. They did an incredible job finding unique Indigenous talent.

They understood the importance of authenticity. The biggest challenge is about Iceland is there's very few Indigenous people in the country at all. So we had to pull from Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. And what's super interesting is we learned that some of the Inupiac Indigenous people actually migrated from the high Arctic of Alaska to the high Arctic of Canada, across to Greenland. We had these Inuit cast members that could have had bloodlines that crossed oceans. It was fun. The casting process was really fun.

As I watched part one, I felt proud to see native people on screen in all of their beauty and complexities. Watching other Alaska natives sharing our culture and our way of life to the watching world was powerful. As a woman, it was empowering to see the priority that was put on casting women to be front and center on and off the screen, especially given the blatant disregard and oppression that many of us have endured. But as Mary Jo notes, this was Isla's point all along.

She wants to make things that are entertaining, that are interesting, that have some guts to them, but she also has a sole agenda. She likes shedding a light on the world that we live in, and sometimes it's not pretty.

Since 2018, I've been an avid podcaster about native life in urban Alaska. One question that drives my work is, what does it mean to be an Alaska Native person today? My goal is to learn from and hear stories from people like me that reflect the real Alaska that I know and love. Love, one of cultural ingenuity, colorful histories, and the joys that have sustained our people to thrive in one of the harshest climates for thousands of years. And yes, there are many challenges, but we don't label Indigenous people in the Arctic as victims of circumstance. Their strength in sharing our voices, sharing our histories, our knowledge, our concerns, and our ideas for how to move forward. Join us next week as we dive deep to uncover more about the series True Detectives: Liz Danvers and Evangeline Navarro, as we speak with Jody Foster and Kaylee Rees, the actors who embody them. We'll We'll also hear from Anne Sears, the first Alaska native woman to become an Alaska state trooper, and the blueprint for these characters. Coming up this season on the official True Detective Night Country podcast.

This is a really brave and beautiful piece, but it's also scary and twisted and really explores the dark part of the psyche of these characters, much in the vein of True Detective.

I'm really proud that you able to see Indigenous stories and using that platform to just speak for those who can't speak, fight for those who can't fight.

The True Detective Night Country podcast is produced by Tenderfoot Labs for HBO. You can follow our show wherever you get your podcasts and stream True Detective Night Country exclusively on max. We'd love it if you could take a second to leave us a review on Apple podcasts and leave a comment to share your thoughts on the show.